
<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">The Christian Science Monitor</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">December 21, 2017</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">Poll says US citizens worry most about health care</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">By Emily Swanson and Ricardo Alsonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">As President Trump completes his first year in office, Americans are increasingly concerned about health care, and their faith that government can fix it has fallen.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 48 percent named health care as a top problem for the government to focus on in the next year, up 17 points in the past two years.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">The poll allows Americans to name up to five priorities and found a wide range of top concerns, including taxes, immigration, and the environment. But aside from health care, no single issue was named by more than 31 percent.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">And 7 in 10 of those who named health care as a top problem said they had little to no confidence that government can improve matters. The public was less pessimistic in last year's edition of the poll, when just over half said they lacked confidence in the problem-solving ability of lawmakers and government institutions.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">Rumblings of discontent have political repercussions for next year's midterm elections and the presidential contest in 2020, said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who follows opinion trends on health care.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class="">"It's the issue that won't go away," said Professor Blendon. "Given the news cycle, taxes should be first, the economy should be second, and this health care thing should be buried."</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="font-family: Helvetica-Light;" class=""><a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2017/1221/Poll-says-US-citizens-worry-most-about-health-care" class="">https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2017/1221/Poll-says-US-citizens-worry-most-about-health-care</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div></body></html>